for those who were talking about Comp earlier - it can be very frustrating but when it clicks, it CLICKS and it's a ton of fun! it does help to have folks to play with
like this 6-stack... folks on it have been on my friends list for varying lengths of time but we only just played together yesterday and it was an absolute BLAST! we were actually losing for most of this particular round but we didn't tilt and just focussed on coming back; the biggest shame is that you can't see the game-winning fight from my perspective
and you can definitely see my assists giving fire in this video; if it was a recent fix, I haven't spotted it, because all my videos from the past 2 weeks show assists giving fire
what broke is likely how much fire is given as well as how assist is defined; what I DID notice in a Mercy video from yesterday (which I'm uploading now) is that you get defensive assists a lot less often, because it will only count an assist if you're healing as someone gets the killing blow
assists use to have a much bigger window for being counted - i.e., I could heal one dude then swap to another dude, but if the first dude gets a kill shortly after, I'll get assist credit for that - and now that "shortly after" feels much, much tighter
the other factor is, as mentioned, how Mercy plays... she's a short-range burst healer which means she shouldn't be in the thick of it all that often anyway, so that automatically means fewer assists, and now EVEN fewer if the assist window has been reduced
Since they're more burst healers, their best targets are tanks with the big health pools. But tanks don't generate all that much damage or assists in comparison to DPS. Which leads into probably the biggest issue/change.
Prior to the Orisa patch, Mercy and Ana always got 50 fire per assist, Lucio got 25, Zen got 15. Now, they get half the fire that their assistee generated while being assisted. Might not even be half of what the assistee themself got if the assisting only started partway through. That's why Lucio and Zen aren't hit as hard. Lucio's assisting everyone around him, and Zen's assisting both his harmony target and everybody shooting at his discord target. Mercy and Ana, though... they're savaged by it. And they get nothing at all when they're basically hiding out of danger. A good Genji who runs away from the enemy to the healer ensconced in cover will then generate no fire whatsoever for them.
Note though that this is how it used to be quite a while ago though. They didn't always get a flat amount per assist, although I couldn't dig up the date where that changed, or what else with it might've changed around the same time to account for it. I think you're right in that the window for assists tightened too. It hink that's why we were getting a lot of weird Mercy PotGs for a while where she seemed to do nothing at all because they began 1-2 seconds after a res all the revived people were generating assist fire for her, often with ults into enemy crowds.
+1
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I think they def changed something in the background. Because not only is SR gain seemingly up, but almost every POTG tonight I saw was mercy. With like 2 people rezes and nothing else.
I think there was some tweaking in the background.
I can fix all of Blizzards QP problems in one suggestion. Just let me like and dislike players on my team after the match, like a quick up or down. Do not let anyone else see the vote. Make the players that I have thumbs up'd more likely to appear in my queue the ones that are down less so. I like QP to decompress and having bad teammates is not the way to relax.
Also I think I have progressed as far as my actual RL old guy coordination can handle. I can see what I want to do far enough ahead now that I can make the decision, I can get a good team comp together, my hands just are not fast enough.
Problem: The guy who was real good at whatever character just got a pile of downvotes, and can't get matches. Now what?
Problem: Everyone thumbs-upped the people who they beat the crap out of to get more easy opponents. Now what?
Etc.
There's zero methods based on user interaction that will not be abused/gamed instantly.
I thought the request was to avoid teammates not opponents. Personally I'm not particularly worried if the shit-talking Genji ends up on the other team where he proceeds to feed the rest of the match, as long as I never have to worry about him throwing on my team.
The other team feels quite the same way about you, so this does leave a bit of an impasse.
Edit: See also "downvote all Genjis Genji sucks lolololol".
That's fine? Goose decides to pull a bad attack Torbjorn with another team, and sticks with Torb while whining about how bad his team is when they get steamrolled. A couple of guys on that team downvote him. Next time he queues, the goose is now on my team. Goose has a chance to show he's not a goose. He decides to keep it up because he's God's gift to Overwatch. I downvote him and next game he's unlikely to show up on my team. Or he doesn't, and so he doesn't get a downvote.
Put a cooldown on it where after a set time period, say 30 days, the downvote disappears. Unless the guy in question was a complete and utter shit weasel, chances are you probably won't even remember that you had downvoted him the next time you see him in game.
So how do you deal with people downvoting the person who took "their" hero? Or the one who didn't switch when they were "told" to? Or the inevitable stack downvoting all of the Genjis because lolz? Downvotes for Mercy not healing through walls at 100 meters?
People are demonstrably awful, and any method of altering grouping based on player interaction that's not "Hey, Skippy who is my actual buddy, would you like to play a game with me?" is doomed to failure.
The people who pull this sort of crap are the type who'd get downvoted themselves anyway. The type of person who throws a fit over somebody taking a specific hero, or complaining about not switching, or demanding that supports bend time and space to heal them, are very likely the type of people to go off in chat or start feeding/cliff jumping. Of course, Blizzard keeps metrics on everything so if it turns out that certain players are abusing the downvote system (ie: let's all downvote our Genji), they could always do something like disabling their ability to downvote for the x number of days.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
Yeah...any system that hinges on folks using it fairly and not abusing it in anyway is usually a bad one.
+5
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
So that is 4 wins as pure support where I gained at least 30 SR.
I think they def changed something in the background. Because not only is SR gain seemingly up, but almost every POTG tonight I saw was mercy. With like 2 people rezes and nothing else.
I think there was some tweaking in the background.
It's certainly possible. They've been really quiet and illusive about the whole thing. It honestly looked to me like the numbers were getting a bit better right before the Uprising patch hit. Still a significant difference, but instead of +15-20 per win and -30-40 per loss, more like +20-25 and -25-30. It's gotten a lot of press over the past few days in things like Kotaku and The Escapist though. That might've prompted some action.
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VivixenneRemember your training, and we'll get through this just fine.Registered Userregular
edited April 2017
I think I'm a fan of healers getting flat amounts of fire for assists. Changing it to a scale can really fuck with the system and doesn't actually stack up with how each support should be played. A Mercy backing off a bit and focussing on healing tanks is going to get less fire, period, because the amount of fire her healing target gets for killing folks is almost always going to be lower than, say, that of a DPS deep in the thick of it. Plus, that means the amount of fire you get is purely dependent on someone ELSE's skill level rather than your own. That does not strike me as a favorable scenario for a Support main.
In fact I'd argue that you can narrow the assist-timing window but then keep the flat amount of fire granted fairly high. A Mercy is going to get fewer assists ANYWAY because she backs off a lot, so when she gets one maybe give it a higher flat amount? You could argue that a Mercy may try to abuse that system by always being in the middle of the combat, but then she's also more likely to die that way, so that problem solves itself. And if you have a Mercy who CAN be in the thick of it and never die, THAT'S A DAMN GOOD MERCY, so reward that shit!
And yeah, like ArcTangent says, Mercy's Res getting POTG isn't actually a problem in and of itself, it's that she can sometimes get a TON of assists immediately afterwards, like if she reses a Pharah who then barfs rockets onto the enemy team. But I find these scenarios few and far between, honestly, and certainly not worth breaking the system over. And who CARES if Mercy gets lots of fire for those plays? It'll incentivise people to play her!
I reckon go back to the old flat-amount system but tweak the numbers a bit if required. Maybe don't count a post-res kill as an assist, since the res itself gives fire anyway. Stuff like that.
I completed my experiment to see where I would get placed on a fresh account rank 25 (and I ended up at like 28 by the end of placements). I placed in high silver, which is to say, a whole rank above where I placed the last two seasons on my main account. I'm not sure what that means but it was interesting nonetheless. At that rank/level, I got matched up many times with either other people doing the same thing as me or actual new players, and you can just tell which is which.
I think I'll just leave that account alone except for doing placements each season, just to see how the two continue to compare. Now, I'll focus on actually grouping with some folks and try to grind up to gold before the season is up.
...if you have a Mercy who CAN be in the thick of it and never die, THAT'S A DAMN GOOD MERCY, so reward that shit!
I met that Mercy last night on Lijiang. She was on the other team, and she was monstrous at just staying alive. I got a few solid picks on her, but they swept the match easily. She was amazing. The one time my team capitalized on her death, we swept the point over the next twenty seconds - just in time for her to respawn and fly in for a 4x rez.
I stopped shooting and did Tracer's cheer emote.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
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VivixenneRemember your training, and we'll get through this just fine.Registered Userregular
edited April 2017
A few more videos from this season. All Blizzard services are currently down so I took the opportunity to do some uploading.
More from the 6-stack I played with yesterday (ignore match chat at the beginning, folks were being idiots): https://youtu.be/OrZA8cLj-io
And from a 4-stack earlier today, featuring some of the same voices again and including the worst PotG I think I've ever seen: https://youtu.be/J3WFmvPwuTI
You know, in all of my rage I forgot my golden rule.
Only comp with friends.
SoloQ is for using new characters (Working on Sombra, because with the current meta being Zen and shield heavy she could be a real pain in the ass).
Hah! I remember awhile back one particular youtuber was trumpeting the believe that Comp was where the serious players went and if you wanted to play seriously then you should do Comp. He held firm to this belief for good while. Then one day he solo queued in Comp. That same day he posted a video apologizing to everyone. Turns out he had only ever Comp'd with a full or nearly full group of friends and didn't actually know how awful solo queuing was. He had been under the mistaken believe that all comp players actually wanted to work as a team. Afterwards he was of the opinion that you should only do Comp if you're queuing up with at least half a team worth of friends.
I would agree. My enjoyment of Comp is pretty much directly proportional to the number of buddies I queued up with.
If I remember correctly, Blizzard was originally only going to allow queuing for competitive with a full group. Then there was a big outcry and they changed their minds.
VivixenneRemember your training, and we'll get through this just fine.Registered Userregular
Aaaaaaaaaaaand a couple more vids, the first one featuring a pretty prolonged fight on Lijiang Tower - it actually starts a bit before the video begins but I had Instant Replay set to only a minute on Shadowplay: https://youtu.be/6F6iB00hRAg
The second one is only so long because I've got some in-game mates who want to see themselves in a video, but it exists cuz I recorded me executing a Tracer with a Discord/HS/Melee combo: https://youtu.be/UP4nXc4NU0s
Also I am one of the few people who understand why they keep explanations tight lipped; if you unveil HOW the system works you allow people to abuse it and that is super bad news bears.
This I completely disagree with. Security through obscurity is never best practice. The system should be transparent and immune to manipulation. The latter would be easier to accomplish if people knew what the system was and could point out ways to abuse it.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Matchmaking continues to be a shitshow, and I just had my first encounter with an obvious smurf account. We had a legit new player on our team, didn't know how to position Torb's turret at all (nor did he understand the map layout). The other team had a new account... but it was a veteran player. He ripped us to goddamn shreds. That was the fastest Eichenwalde map ever.
Matchmaking continues to be a shitshow, and I just had my first encounter with an obvious smurf account. We had a legit new player on our team, didn't know how to position Torb's turret at all (nor did he understand the map layout). The other team had a new account... but it was a veteran player. He ripped us to goddamn shreds. That was the fastest Eichenwalde map ever.
Hey, at least it was trying, instead of doing the really fun thing where one team gets three rookies and the other side gets none.
The good thing with Genji is that he gets reflect refunded on every assist, and you get a LOT of assists against robots. So you can deal out serious damage with endless dashes.
But he also doesn't quite have the damage avoidance of Tracer, and vertical mobility doesn't really help in PvE.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
The good thing with Genji is that he gets reflect refunded on every assist, and you get a LOT of assists against robots. So you can deal out serious damage with endless dashes.
But he also doesn't quite have the damage avoidance of Tracer, and vertical mobility doesn't really help in PvE.
But his ULT is probably better.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited April 2017
I really really like Sombra's play but her validity in comp at my current skill level with her is just not a possible thing.
I caused half a team to ragequit on Anubis by hacking the 2 health packs and basically turning Tracer into target practice and nullifying their Rein/Osiris shield combos and frying Zenyatta with that ult.
But man, go against half-decent players and I'd be hamburger.
Will continue to explore this playstyle, because being a crippling menace is just so much fun and hugely refreshing. She doesn't play like anyone else.
jungleroomx on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I just ran into what was probably the best Orisa player I've seen. I ran for cover from D.Va's ult, and Orisa threw her orb out to snare me to just barely be in LoS to die to it. I was pretty damn impressed.
0
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
See team queue up all dps for a QP game of Kings Row attack. Don't bother to really question anything.
Literally steamroll the match. The payload stopped twice for no more than 10 seconds.
Damn...bought a 24 pack of loot boxes for the first time. All blues and greys, except two epic amounts of gold, and the Tracer legendary event outfit.
Mistakes were made.
I'm also continually amazed that as a healer, it's somehow always my fault. Just had a competitive match that was going fine, a guy suddenly screams, "CAN I GET A FUCKING HEAL FOR ONCE IN THIS GAME?"*
But, on the bright side, people actually came to my defense and shut the guy down, so that was nice.
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
Hey I had one where I was mercying, and like 5 seconds after I rez some dude yells about where is the rez. End of the round of assault, and he tells me to stop saving rezes for POTG (I rezzed 3 times that round, which is likely me not waiting LONG ENOUGH)
He never let up. He kept bitching the whole match. Like all he wanted was for me to tilt or something
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
So if you get a repeat of any skin that costs 3000 coins to manually purchase, you get 200 coins. That's pretty hefty for one crate.
Posts
Since they're more burst healers, their best targets are tanks with the big health pools. But tanks don't generate all that much damage or assists in comparison to DPS. Which leads into probably the biggest issue/change.
Prior to the Orisa patch, Mercy and Ana always got 50 fire per assist, Lucio got 25, Zen got 15. Now, they get half the fire that their assistee generated while being assisted. Might not even be half of what the assistee themself got if the assisting only started partway through. That's why Lucio and Zen aren't hit as hard. Lucio's assisting everyone around him, and Zen's assisting both his harmony target and everybody shooting at his discord target. Mercy and Ana, though... they're savaged by it. And they get nothing at all when they're basically hiding out of danger. A good Genji who runs away from the enemy to the healer ensconced in cover will then generate no fire whatsoever for them.
Note though that this is how it used to be quite a while ago though. They didn't always get a flat amount per assist, although I couldn't dig up the date where that changed, or what else with it might've changed around the same time to account for it. I think you're right in that the window for assists tightened too. It hink that's why we were getting a lot of weird Mercy PotGs for a while where she seemed to do nothing at all because they began 1-2 seconds after a res all the revived people were generating assist fire for her, often with ults into enemy crowds.
I think there was some tweaking in the background.
That's fine? Goose decides to pull a bad attack Torbjorn with another team, and sticks with Torb while whining about how bad his team is when they get steamrolled. A couple of guys on that team downvote him. Next time he queues, the goose is now on my team. Goose has a chance to show he's not a goose. He decides to keep it up because he's God's gift to Overwatch. I downvote him and next game he's unlikely to show up on my team. Or he doesn't, and so he doesn't get a downvote.
Put a cooldown on it where after a set time period, say 30 days, the downvote disappears. Unless the guy in question was a complete and utter shit weasel, chances are you probably won't even remember that you had downvoted him the next time you see him in game.
The people who pull this sort of crap are the type who'd get downvoted themselves anyway. The type of person who throws a fit over somebody taking a specific hero, or complaining about not switching, or demanding that supports bend time and space to heal them, are very likely the type of people to go off in chat or start feeding/cliff jumping. Of course, Blizzard keeps metrics on everything so if it turns out that certain players are abusing the downvote system (ie: let's all downvote our Genji), they could always do something like disabling their ability to downvote for the x number of days.
Seems something changed.
It's certainly possible. They've been really quiet and illusive about the whole thing. It honestly looked to me like the numbers were getting a bit better right before the Uprising patch hit. Still a significant difference, but instead of +15-20 per win and -30-40 per loss, more like +20-25 and -25-30. It's gotten a lot of press over the past few days in things like Kotaku and The Escapist though. That might've prompted some action.
In fact I'd argue that you can narrow the assist-timing window but then keep the flat amount of fire granted fairly high. A Mercy is going to get fewer assists ANYWAY because she backs off a lot, so when she gets one maybe give it a higher flat amount? You could argue that a Mercy may try to abuse that system by always being in the middle of the combat, but then she's also more likely to die that way, so that problem solves itself. And if you have a Mercy who CAN be in the thick of it and never die, THAT'S A DAMN GOOD MERCY, so reward that shit!
And yeah, like ArcTangent says, Mercy's Res getting POTG isn't actually a problem in and of itself, it's that she can sometimes get a TON of assists immediately afterwards, like if she reses a Pharah who then barfs rockets onto the enemy team. But I find these scenarios few and far between, honestly, and certainly not worth breaking the system over. And who CARES if Mercy gets lots of fire for those plays? It'll incentivise people to play her!
I reckon go back to the old flat-amount system but tweak the numbers a bit if required. Maybe don't count a post-res kill as an assist, since the res itself gives fire anyway. Stuff like that.
I think I'll just leave that account alone except for doing placements each season, just to see how the two continue to compare. Now, I'll focus on actually grouping with some folks and try to grind up to gold before the season is up.
I met that Mercy last night on Lijiang. She was on the other team, and she was monstrous at just staying alive. I got a few solid picks on her, but they swept the match easily. She was amazing. The one time my team capitalized on her death, we swept the point over the next twenty seconds - just in time for her to respawn and fly in for a 4x rez.
I stopped shooting and did Tracer's cheer emote.
More from the 6-stack I played with yesterday (ignore match chat at the beginning, folks were being idiots):
And from a 4-stack earlier today, featuring some of the same voices again and including the worst PotG I think I've ever seen:
And one from a week ago, featuring my season high KS of 26:
I managed to get a cut of some crazy super sneak mercy play last night. I need to get that fixed up and uploaded.
Only comp with friends.
SoloQ is for using new characters (Working on Sombra, because with the current meta being Zen and shield heavy she could be a real pain in the ass).
Hah! I remember awhile back one particular youtuber was trumpeting the believe that Comp was where the serious players went and if you wanted to play seriously then you should do Comp. He held firm to this belief for good while. Then one day he solo queued in Comp. That same day he posted a video apologizing to everyone. Turns out he had only ever Comp'd with a full or nearly full group of friends and didn't actually know how awful solo queuing was. He had been under the mistaken believe that all comp players actually wanted to work as a team. Afterwards he was of the opinion that you should only do Comp if you're queuing up with at least half a team worth of friends.
I would agree. My enjoyment of Comp is pretty much directly proportional to the number of buddies I queued up with.
edit- Lol, it was Unit Lost
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
The second one is only so long because I've got some in-game mates who want to see themselves in a video, but it exists cuz I recorded me executing a Tracer with a Discord/HS/Melee combo:
This I completely disagree with. Security through obscurity is never best practice. The system should be transparent and immune to manipulation. The latter would be easier to accomplish if people knew what the system was and could point out ways to abuse it.
Hey, at least it was trying, instead of doing the really fun thing where one team gets three rookies and the other side gets none.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Deflect may be a good answer to the tank bastions? I guess it depends on what his time to kill is on the regular bots.
But he also doesn't quite have the damage avoidance of Tracer, and vertical mobility doesn't really help in PvE.
But his ULT is probably better.
We were on legendary.
Like... It's bad? Or... It's sexy? Or... What?
He must be the Legendary Hanzo itself.
I caused half a team to ragequit on Anubis by hacking the 2 health packs and basically turning Tracer into target practice and nullifying their Rein/Osiris shield combos and frying Zenyatta with that ult.
But man, go against half-decent players and I'd be hamburger.
Will continue to explore this playstyle, because being a crippling menace is just so much fun and hugely refreshing. She doesn't play like anyone else.
Literally steamroll the match. The payload stopped twice for no more than 10 seconds.
Mistakes were made.
I'm also continually amazed that as a healer, it's somehow always my fault. Just had a competitive match that was going fine, a guy suddenly screams, "CAN I GET A FUCKING HEAL FOR ONCE IN THIS GAME?"*
But, on the bright side, people actually came to my defense and shut the guy down, so that was nice.
He never let up. He kept bitching the whole match. Like all he wanted was for me to tilt or something